Adobe Lightroom CC

With Apple basically having turned its back on continuing to develop its “pro” photo management app, Aperture, serious Mac photographers are essentially left with Adobe’s Lightroom as the only real game in town. Many photographers already preferred Lightroom to Aperture, if for no other reason than the fact that Adobe kept up a pretty brisk update cycle that seems to have fallen into a stride of one major upgrade per year. This spring brings Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC ($10/month), an update that preserves all of the features, UI, and workflow that Lightroom fans have come to love, with some great new added features such as Face Detection, HDR image support, panorama creation, video slideshows, HTML5 web galleries, and more.

The subscription-based Creative Cloud version of Lightroom also provides users with the latest version of Photoshop CC and Adobe’s iPhone and iPad versions of Lightroom. That comes along with a cloud-based synchronization service that keeps your entire Lightroom library synced up between your iPhone, iPad, Mac and even Windows PCs, basically without any restrictions on Lightroom library size and even support for pro features such as Smart Previews and RAW photo editing on the iOS side. That said, for those who would prefer to avoid the subscription model and have no need for the extra features or mobile apps, Adobe also still sells Lightroom as a standalone desktop-only version — Lightroom 6 — for $150, making it one of the few Adobe apps that still continues to be available outside of the Creative Cloud programs.